WASHINGTON-Public-safety officials last week told a powerful lawmaker that his bill to get Internet high-speed access to rural America using low-power TV signals could damage public safety’s efforts to get more spectrum.
“We understand that [this bill] was intended to address the need for digital data services in rural areas. However, the bill as introduced does not include any such limitation, and thus would also allow urban and suburban area LPTV stations to attain protected status. Those are also the areas which face the most severe shortages of public-safety radio spectrum, and where protecting LPTV stations could have the most significant impact on the TV transition process,” said the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials International Inc. in a letter to Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.), chairman of the Senate communications subcommittee.
Burns has introduced a bill to give low-power TV broadcasters primary status if they offer high-speed interactive Internet services to rural America.
If the LPTV broadcaster received primary status on a station slated to be used for DTV transmission, this could mean that broadcaster would not have to move from channels 59-69, thus defeating any band-clearing arrangements. Channel 59 must be cleared to protect it from interference in services being offered on channel 60.
The Federal Communications Commission said last month that it will presume that arrangements between broadcasters and wireless carriers to clear spectrum in TV channels 59-69 are in the public interest.
Congress said in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 that broadcasters do not have to transition to digital television until 2007 and 85 percent of the homes in their territory have digital receivers.
Once the transition is completed, 24 megahertz was to be set aside for public-safety operations and 36 megahertz was to be auctioned for commercial operations.
The FCC has allocated TV channels 63, 64, 68 and 69 for public-safety operations.
APCO is concerned because Burns’ bill does not expressly exclude low-power TV stations on channels 60-69. APCO acknowledged that could happen when the bill is marked up by the full committee, perhaps as early as this week.
The Senate Commerce Committee is set to meet Thursday, but the meeting agenda has not been completed.
700 MHz auction
On another 60-69 matter, the FCC said last week that it would allow participants in the Sept. 6 auction of commercial spectrum to use package bidding.
Package bidding allows parties to bid on individual licenses or to place all-or-nothing bids on up to 12 packages of licenses of their own design. The winning bids are the set of consistent bids on individual licenses and packages that maximize total revenue when the auction closes. Consistent bids are bids that do not overlap and are made or renewed by an individual bidder in the same round.
Notwithstanding concerns that it was too late in the game to allow package bidding, the FCC on July 3 said package bidding would “allow bidders to better express the value of any synergies (benefits from combining complementary items) that may exist among licenses.”
The FCC plans to auction two licenses in each of six different regions. One license is for a pair of 10-megahertz slices and another license is for a pair of five-megahertz slices. The remaining six megahertz are being auctioned separately as a guard band to protect public-safety operations.
Package bidding will allow a participant desiring all six 20-megahertz licenses in order to implement a nationwide service to bid on all six as a package and thereby avoid the risk of winning only some of the desired licenses or of paying more for those licenses than it wishes.
Some companies, such as Verizon Wireless, wanted an unlimited amount of packages, but the FCC said it could not foresee any participant having a strategic need for 4,095 options.
“It is highly unlikely that any serious bidder actually needs to bid on all 4,095 combinations of licenses that are possible in this auction. Moreover, allowing bidders to bid on unlimited number of packages would introduce the risk of bidders `parking’ bids, which could lead to an unacceptable pace for the auction … Allowing 4,095 possible packages may lead to computational difficulties,” said the FCC.
Participants will be allowed to change their packages until a bid is placed, any changes after that will count against the 12-package limit.
